Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution. – Gustave Flaubert
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it. – Gustave Flaubert
One mustnt ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness. – Gustave Flaubert
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him. – Gustave Flaubert
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it. But when we pick ourselves up we find our bones are, after all, not broken; while level enough and not unpleasing is the new terrace which lies unexplored before us. – Logan Pearsall Smith, “Age and Death,” Afterthoughts, 1931